Today, I added a Totem Cleanse command that siphons the shadow energy stored in the totem into a "crystal" (I haven't actually coded the crystals yet). It takes a couple of minutes to cleanse a fully blighted totem, and at each "tic", there's a chance of a combat encounter with blighted creatures. Eventually, I want to add additional features to totems where they require longer-term care and may have to be uprooted and replaced entirely. We also need a way to heal the blighted land. My thought is that you have to cull the blighted vegetation and then cast regrowth spells. If so, then I'd add a percentage of culled land to the commune status.

On the web portal, I added "News" to the navigation bar and implemented functionality for admins to write news posts within the web portal, rather than in-game (which I'm currently doing). I spoke with a friend who provided me with several ideas for incorporating features on the web portal, such as in-game event announcements, event logs, and journals. I don't think we'll have journals, but dreams would be fun and thematic. She pointed me to the Arx website, which was really helpful. Arx is an Evennia game, and it's open source. I reviewed the Arx code, and it's significantly better than my code, but I learned some valuable lessons from reviewing it. It'll be a good resource when I'm stuck.

Tomorrow, I plan to create the crystal objects and incorporate them into the totem cleansing logic, ensuring that you actually have a crystal and that it has the capacity to absorb shadow energy. Time permitting, I'll set up the corresponding quest with Luna. Eventually, I'll have to face some issues with the quest system and make some hard decisions. I had wanted builders to be able to create quests using a simplified scripting language, but there are some challenges, and fixing them will be a big detour for me. I'm going to think of alternatives.